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Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The first day of class arrived and I was pretty tired since it was hard to sleep - the level of excitement in just being at the beautiful Presentation Center, meeting so many fantastic women, the beautiful opening invocation and the crazy rattling radiators...oh, yeah, the old radiators in many of the rooms were making quite a racket throughout the night. No wonder Cindy suggested bringing ear plugs!!

After breakfast, we began by setting up our work stations for making some super cool art books...Louise Gale was my neighbor across the table and you can see her peeking above the table on the lower left. Ann Deakers is standing in red to the left - she is really cool and made a great art book which you can see a page of at Beth Nicholl's bloghere. Chrissy is hiding behind her hair in this picture on the left and Cathy was sitting next to me- such fun artists to work with!

Then someone began to drop little gifts of bits and bobs which meant the goodie bag swap was underway; there were many wonderful little goodie bags, so many darling little treats to be worked into future collage for months to come!

Circle of Women

We finally came around the "Teacher's Table" in a circle to introduce ourselves...

From l to r: Kelly Rae, Mindy, Danielle, Pamela and Heather

Such wonderful women, many trying their hand at something artful for the first time, some earning a living at their art full time, like Mindy Lacefield, who was a "hiding celebrity" in our midst! Mindy was recently written up in Cloth, Paper, Scissors and featured at ETSY in their "Quit Your Day Job" profiles. You can see an awesome page of her book at Beth's blog...

Danielle Fraser came from Ontario, Canada and has been creating for a while but only just began her blog in the past few weeks before the retreat. Her blog is super adorable and she has a creative space that makes me green with envy (in a good way!). She made a great book, which you'll see soon in another post...

There were also "teachers" in the class such as Anna-Marie who teaches art workshops and vowed to fight her 'teaching' instincts and allow herself to be a student for a change. She introduced us to a most miraculous tool, that even Kelly Rae didn't know about: the Crop-A-Dile that makes hole punching through hard cover books feel like you're punching through butter! Needless to say, I ran out and bought one when I got home...

Tiffany Moore gives art demos in her current job and gave us a demo of how to work with embossing powder, which I really wanted to learn and turns out to be super-simple! She told funny stories of the folks she encounters who think they can use a regular hair dryer with embossing powders...needless to say, they all come back for the heat gun!

Davielle Huffman talked about the influence of her friend Ann Deakers - how Ann began blogging and encouraging Davielle to try it and to try out the Artful Journey Retreat. I was so impressed that Ann had been blogging for a few years already...I know Ann is close to my mother's age (somewhere around 60-something) and my mother is very paranoid about computers and the internet, so it was really inspiring to see a few older women at this retreat who are really embracing internet technology and making it work for them. I hope I can be that forward-thinking and cool when I get to that age!

Snapshot: Holly Carson

From l to r: Karin, Holly, Lorrie, Donna

On the first night at dinner I met Holly Carson, who came with her daughter Kayla who was taking a different class at the retreat. They are the sweetest and gentlest souls you could ever encounter. You can see a picture of this mother-daughter team on Cindy's blog...

Holly is what I originally wanted to be: an Art Therapist. Holly studied Psychology and minored in Art to work as an Art Therapist, but she's now a general psychologist who utilizes art with her patients quite often. She does not make art for herself, so she came to this retreat to give herself that gift...

Holly immersed in making an art book...

The day we actually worked with our hard covers Holly had beautiful covers from an old edition of Youth's Companion, which I used to read about in the Little House in the Prarie books as a young girl. She was kind enough to let me handle those beautiful relics when I asked if I could and she gave me a few extra pages that she had from the original book, happy to give me something that reminded me of my childhood...I just loved Holly's sweet and gentle spirit. I'll be posting a picture of Holly with a page from her book soon...

Making it a Family Affair

Holly and Kayla were not the only mother/daughter team at the retreat; in fact the other two mother/daughter teams were in our class: Karin (see photo #4) is the mother of Tiffany who gave the embossing powder demo and the other team was from New Mexico: Joli and her mother Peggy who is blogging at Passions of an Odd Chick. She has a great post about our time at the retreat and Peggy seemed to be wearing the most awesome necklaces for every day we were there...and necklaces were on my mind since the Artists Reception was taking place later in the evening - more about that coming up soon...

I just loved that there were mother/daughter teams at this event. What a wonderful way to spend time together!

Stay tuned for more stories...

correction:

it seems the facilitators for the Soul Collage was not the author but another mother/daughter-in-law duo of Rooni and Ria; Rooni conducted the beautiful invocation =-)